In case you missed it, the most pernicious part of Icecrown Citadel’s Gating vanished on Tuesday:

After each region’s maintenance this week, raids will no longer lose attempts on wipes in Normal mode for Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana’thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. There will still be limited attempts in Heroic mode.

We will continue to monitor developments in Icecrown Citadel in the future, especially since the Heroic difficulty has been unlocked by a significant number of raids. (Source)

I will admit, I was expecting this development at some point, but this felt too soon. Should I feel ashamed or something that Axiom was not among that “significant number of raids”? Or, you know, even among those that had unlocked the Lich King?

I can’t say that I am. I can’t really speak for Seri, or others in charge, but since we’ve focused our time on working on the non-attempt locked bosses I’m assuming that they were laboring under the same assumption that I was – namely that we’d at least have a few weeks before the counter was removed from normal mode.

For those of you feeling like Blizzard just poked your Bloodrage button – I can understand. The Lich King had only been unlock-able a week. You could be forgiven for thinking that Blizzard only put this “feature” into ICC to put the reigns on the top tier of raiding guilds. Which is to say it failed utterly since the Lich King was dead 24 hours after the potential to do so was made available.

The effect was really only to make it more difficult for the next tier of raiders to take down (or even take shots at!) the Lich King that first week. A kind of double kick in the no-no parts of raider pride. You cannot say now “Well, we’re not a top 100 raid guild – but at least we killed the Lich King when he required attempts to do so.” Either you killed him in the first week it was available – or you’re just a scrub.

Oh. Wait, there is that matter of the buff. So there is some hope left to distinguish yourself from the unwashed masses.

Better do it quick though – no telling when Blizzard will start implementing that one. Recent developments indicate it could be as soon as next week.